


Transformation Sequence

by Selden



Category: Original Work
Genre: Body Horror, Body Modification, F/F, Mention of Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-23
Updated: 2015-06-23
Packaged: 2018-04-05 20:44:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4194291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Selden/pseuds/Selden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Patching up a broken Gunner should have been an easy job.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Transformation Sequence

**Author's Note:**

  * For [VampirePaladin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/VampirePaladin/gifts).



When they brought the Gunner to Helena, she used it as a coat-rack.

A prissy little cleric brought it down from the high citadel, trussed up in sackcloth and thrown into the bottom of a barge like a body in a murder mystery. Helena was more interested in the crates packed with delicate glassware that came in the same barge, flasks and retorts packed in rags and straw like so many great glass bladders. When the cleric had the bargemen heave the Gunner out as well, shut them out of the laboratory, and fussed around unwrapping it in the middle of the floor, Helena leant back against the wall and rolled her eyes.

"The Castellan wants you to make it move," said the cleric, pushing her round glasses up over beady eyes. "Or the top half, at least. You can remove the bottom half. She'd like to mount it over the entrance to the citadel, you see."

Helena looked dubiously at the Gunner. It was about nine feet long; a vaguely humanoid form armoured in dull black metal rough as sharkskin. One arm still had its original gun built in, support struts and ammunition rechargers twining round the black armour like thick vines and disappearing into the bulk of the Gunner's shoulders, where the armour was built up into a neckpiece that crested in a curve of spikes high above its head. The effect was dramatic, to be sure. Overdramatic, some might argue. The gun itself was quite small; it was hard to believe that, if accounts of the war were to be believed, such weapons had been capable of mowing down ten Eaters with one blast. The other arm was missing its gun and trailing withered black tubes from its shoulder-piece. And the front of the Gunner's helmet was cracked wide open, showing a slice of glassy grey skin through the jagged hole. The entire thing was covered in a thick scurf of dust and grime. It looked most unlikely that it would ever move again, and Helena told the cleric as much.

"I was given to understand that getting things to move was a speciality of yours, Alchemist Second Class de Sousa," said the cleric snippily, gesturing to the shelves lining the walls Helena's laboratory, where sure enough things twitched and spasmed gently as they floated in jars of greenish glass. "By all accounts these Gunners were powered by elixir and controlled by simple cantrips, and while any alchemist can provide the latter, I was given to understand that recreating the former was by way of being your life's work. It's certainly why the citadel supplies you with raw materials and an allowance which is, frankly, more than generous."

"I see," said Helena, pushing herself away from the wall and looking down at the Gunner. "Well, in that case, I'll give the repairs my most urgent attention."

"I should hope so," said the cleric, somewhat mollified.

As soon as she left, sitting upright in the front of the barge like a stiff figurehead, Helena dragged the Gunner over to the one free patch of wall, right next to the rusted double doors of the laboratory. She propped the Gunner up, cleared up the sackcloth, and swept the trail of dust it had shed out over the jetty and into the thick green water of the canal. Then she opened herself a bottle of beer and turned to unpack her crates of glassware.

Half-way through lifting out delicate flasks and thick, bubble-shot jars, her eye was caught by the Gunner's empty left hand, lying curled on its thigh like the hands of the dolls she and her sister had played with as children, carved to hold some little object long since lost. Helena shrugged, pulled out another bottle of beer, and propped it gingerly upright in the Gunner's rigid grasp. Then, feeling vaguely that justice had been done, she turned back to her work and forgot the Gunner entirely.

 

\--

 

It was at least a fortnight later when Helena's fellow Alchemist Second Class, the beak-nosed and irrepressively cheerful Dorothea Roberts, came round to her laboratory. She was bringing a wooden box full of dried fingers, all from different hands and all carefully nestled in green velvet.

"I saw this and I thought of you, dear," she told Helena. Then she saw the Gunner.

By now, the Gunner had acquired a couple of Helena's shabby jackets, draped across its shoulder-pieces. Her battered leather hat hung at a rakish angle from one tall spike of its crest. It was still holding the unopened bottle of beer.

Dorothea Roberts raised an eyebrow.

"It's busy-work for the citadel," Helena said impatiently. "I'm meant to get it moving again so that they can stick it up over their front door."

"All the refined good taste and tact we've come to expect from our lords and masters, I see," said Dorothea. She tapped one green-varnished nail against the Gunner's cracked faceplate. "Shouldn't you be getting on with it, then?" she asked. "I imagine the Castellan wants to see something more for her money than, well, this." And she flicked a hand at the things in jars, which twisted and pulsed as ever in the jumpy, dappled light reflected from the canal outside.

"You sound like the cleric they sent to bully me in the first place," said Helena mulishly. "I have better things to do with my time."

"Do you really?" said Dorothea mildly. "You know, there's a reason they had alchemists make these horrible things, back in the day. Eaters were nasty things. Is dabbling with their flesh really such a good idea?"

"Oh, I really wouldn't know," said Helena wearily. "It only offers us the chance of conquering death itself. Nothing of great importance."

Dorothea shook her head. "You know, Helena," she said cautiously. "Your sister -"

"Don't," said Helena. She looked down at the box of desiccated fingers, nestled like jewels in their velvet casing. A relic from early in the war, perhaps, back when alchemists had been trying to fight the Eaters with knowledge rather than brute force. Or something more sentimental, perhaps. She pulled down a jar half full of elixir, glossy and thick as heavy oil, clear as rosewater, and dropped in one withered finger. Under Dorothea's fascinated gaze, it filled out a little, almost as if putting on fresh flesh. And then, as if beckoning to some unseen presence, it gave a gentle twitch.

"Well," said Dorothea. "That's certainly something new." She frowned down at the finger, floating in its jar like a new kind of fish. "How did you tweak your formula this time? The elixir was never so potent before."

"Even more distillation," said Helena. "Exceptionally tedious. Want a beer?"

"Very well, obfuscate away," said Dorothea. "And no thank you, dear," she said, looking at the beer bottles lined up in between Helena's jars of flesh and shuddering slightly. "I think I'll pass."

"Your loss," said Helena brightly. "Thank you for the fingers!"

"You're really very welcome," said Dorothea. "And, Helena -"

"Yes?"

"Don't keep the citadel waiting, dear." And she swept out to her waiting boat, heels clacking on the bleached planks of the jetty. Helena followed and waved as the boatman rowed her away, the sound of the oars echoing back at her long after Dorothea's boat could no longer be seen.

 

\--

 

Helena's laboratory was in an almost empty part of the lower city. A wide square stretched on the far side of the canal, its cement cracked and crazed, sinewy weeds with pale yellow flowers pushing up in ragged clumps. But further along the canal and all around the square rose dense networks of tall blockish buildings and narrow waterways, where sounds bowed and swung in strange ways against tall concrete walls, stained with watermarks and long tongues of rusty seepage.

When the city had been the only refuge from the Eaters, these buildings had been crammed with people, hammered with footsteps. Ripe with sewage and fruit markets. Now only a few eccentrics such as herself lived in the lower city, though market stalls and scattered shops still lined the roads leading up from the outer gates to the high citadel. Children came to explore, leaving spatterings of bright graffiti behind them, and old men came sometimes to sit on perilous old jetties and dangle lines and nets down into the green waters of the canals, marked out in blocks of shadow by the buildings overhead; a sharp-edged ribbon down the centre reflecting the sky in blue or whitish grey. It was said that the fish in the canals grew, nowadays, extraordinarily large.

People came to see Helena, too, on occasion: another aging oddity of the lower city. They came for cantrips too petty or too experimental for the Alchemists First Class of the citadel to bother with, or they came because they knew that in lieu of payment Helena would accept a sack of onions, heavy with rich soil from outside the city walls, or a shred of likely Eater-flesh, dried up but twitching, still, if you dripped human blood on it. Sometimes children found such flesh even in the lower city itself, lodged in rubble scored through by Gunner-fire. Helena knew that she lived in an old battle ground; that once the canals had swarmed with hungry corpses like pale fish.

 

She told the Gunner so, in fact, the day after Dorothea's visit, as she worked a thin glass feeding-tube into a likely-looking port in its shoulder.

"Though you'd know that, of course," she said, slapping the Gunner on its rough armour and turning to add the secret ingredient to the elixir that was beginning to slowly pearl its way down the feeding tube and into the Gunner.

This last ingredient - the reason all her precious bits and bobs of ancient flesh had grown so plump and lively - was something she was accepting more and more by way of payment. A few drops, no more, from a grateful client, would return a scrap of old Eater to liveliness for weeks at a time. Her own blood, she had discovered, had grown less effective in the wake of certain - perhaps unwise - experiments. People were happy enough to give their own, in return for a broken bone set to mending or a cantrip to keep rats from grain, she had discovered.

On this occasion, however, she used her own blood, letting it colour the clear elixir with the faintest tinge of pink, delicate as a petal or a sunset.

"It seems appropriate," she told the Gunner. "After all, you have been wearing my favourite hat for at least a week."

She slapped a dressing over the wound on her arm and stepped back. The Gunner sat, still and sprawled as ever, in its place by the doorway. The sound of lapping water, and the smell of the canal in summer, dank and slightly sour, came in through the open doors. Behind her, tiny thumps and splashings came from her rows of jars.

Light glinted off the Gunner's cracked face-plate. It was smoother than the rest of the Gunner's armour, and Helena could see herself reflected in it, small and curved. A loose red shirt, a tangle of dark hair, cropped short. Dark eyes; a dark wide slash of a mouth. A little figure, half lost in the splintered hole that showed a greyish curve of cheek; the corner of a mouth.

It was unwise, Helena knew, to cause more damage to the armour than was necessary, but despite herself she reached forwards and pulled at the Gunner's face-plate. It turned out to be quite firmly fixed; in the end she had to use a cantrip for unfastening the lids from jars, and reach inside the shattered armour, past the Gunner's clammy flesh, to pick and pull at the inner seal.

In the end, the face-plate came off quite suddenly and almost all of a piece. A few splintered fragments that had been lodged inside clattered to the floor.

The Gunner had been a woman, Helena discovered. About ten or so years older than herself, with a wide nose and high cheekbones. A knotted scar, running down from under one eye and vanishing below the neck of the armour, pulled the flesh of the Gunner's mouth up at one side, giving it a faintly sardonic expression. Her eyebrows, Helena noticed, still showed signs of being neatly plucked.

"Well," she said after a moment. "Pleased to meet you, ma'am."

The Gunner's face remained unmoving, waxy and grey, her eyelids firmly closed.

 

Nevertheless, after this, Helena found that talking to the Gunner was becoming a habit.

 

"Horrible weather we're having," she'd say, as sudden summer rain drummed on the laboratory skylights and turned the canal outside into a mass of steely pockmarks.

"Of course, everybody knows that blood has some effect on Eater flesh," she'd explain, filtering faintly pink-tinted elixir into a great jar of greenish glass. "But of course you'd know that better than anyone living, wouldn't you? Being something very like an Eater yourself, that is."

"Looking pretty sharp, if I say so myself," she'd say, hanging her hat back on the spikes of the Gunner's headpiece. "I can't imagine those were much use in battle, but they do look very ominous, I'll give you that."

 

The Gunner received all these remarks with equanimity, mouth fixed in the same half-smile.

Helena had never had so congenial an audience. In fact, when one night she woke, shuddering out of sleep on her camp-bed in a corner of the laboratory, she did not pull the covers back over her head and lie still till sleep or morning came to save her, but tipped herself out of bed, lit a lantern, and took herself and a bottle of beer over to the dark hulk of the Gunner, where cool air threaded under the doors from the dark canal and the Gunner's face, lamp-lit, looked almost warm.

"I was dreaming about Amelia again," she said. "My sister. I probably haven't mentioned her."

The Gunner remained silent.

Helena took a pull at her beer and went on. "It must be almost thirty years ago by now," she said. "It was nothing remarkable. We were children, playing down here where we shouldn't. The lower city was empty even then, you know. She was a year older, always the more adventurous one.

We were playing above a flooded courtyard; sheer walls down to the water, when she slipped. I searched for rope; tried to climb down myself. She was a strong swimmer, you know. She shouted up to me; told me not to worry. But when I came back down from the high citadel with help, she was gone."

She coughed, beer acid in her stomach.

"Oh," she said, "I know there wouldn't be anything of her to bring back. The fish had her. She's long gone. But still," she said briskly, "that's no reason to let death win, is it?"

She held the bottle up to the lantern-light, frowning. "You know," she said to the Gunner, "I think this beer has gone off."

And she went out of the double doors and was neatly sick into the canal.

In the morning, only the half-empty beer bottle, abandoned by the Gunner's foot, showed that anything at all had happened in the night.

 

\--

 

It was a week later when the Gunner first spoke.

 

"Really," the Gunner said dryly, "don't feel you have to rush."

"And we can probably fix some mechanism to make your arms move, if all else fails," Helena was saying. "I bet the Castellan would lap it up if I made you wave. Wait, what?"

"There's really no hurry," said the Gunner. "Not when it comes to sticking me up on a wall as some kind of municipal artwork. Don't rush on my account."

Helena dropped the bottle she was holding. "You're dead," she said blankly, beer pooling at her feet.

"Indeed," said the Gunner. "And yet I move. That was the idea, wasn't it?" And, slowly, painfully, she opened her eyes. They were an unremarkable colour: a light greyish blue. A little clouded, perhaps. Dry, evidently; the Gunner blinked rapidly, shaking her head a little.

Helena stepped back.

"Please," said the Gunner, "don't be alarmed. I have no intention of harming you. Indeed," she said, "I couldn't even if I wanted to. It appears I am still incapable of moving my limbs." She fixed her pale eyes on Helena. "If nothing else," she said, "please tell me this. Are the Eaters truly gone?"

Helena stared at her. The Gunner's skin was still greyish, her lips still dry. Still. Still, she lived, or something very like it. "The Eaters have been gone for over a hundred years," she said at length.

"All of them?"

"All of them. Gone completely."

The Gunner gave a long, whistling sigh. Her mouth turned up a little more, where the scar was.

She was, Helena realised, smiling.

"Gone completely," said the Gunner, "except for these ugly little horrors."

She was talking, Helena realised, about the things in her jars. "If it wasn't for these 'ugly little horrors'," she said tartly, "you wouldn't be - wouldn't be whatever you are. They pose no danger to anybody."

The Gunner shook her head, slowly. "I'm afraid, Helena," she said - "I may call you Helena, may I not?"

"It's Alchemist de Sousa, Second Class," said Helena, a little hectically.

"I'm afraid, Alchemist de Sousa, Second Class, that isn't entirely true."

 

But when Helena tried to ask the Gunner what she meant, she would only twist her grey face into a frown and claim tiredness.

"My body has a great deal of waking up to do still, Alchemist Second Class," she said. "And for once in my long life, I understand there is no looming emergency. Unless the high citadel comes calling, I suppose."

"How long have you been awake?" asked Helena suspiciously.

But the Gunner closed her eyes again and refused to be moved. Indeed, Helena realised, there was nothing except her broken bottle of beer to show that anything untoward had taken place at all.

The Gunner was still holding the beer Helena had made it grasp when it had first arrived, she realised. Plucking it out of the Gunner's stiff grip, she popped the lid and tried to swig it back. But most of her beer nowadays seemed to be stale, and this was no exception; she spat out her mouthful and, suddenly furious, bowled the bottle out through the open doors and into the canal, watching it trail an arc of amber liquid behind it as it went.

"Hey," said the Gunner faintly, eyes still closed. "I really think I had a decent claim on that beer."

"You couldn't drink it anyway," said Helena.

"No more I could," said the Gunner peaceably. And, dry dead mouth a little open, it appeared to go to sleep.

 

\--

 

It took a week before the Gunner could move properly again.

"Of course," said Helena anxiously, "I'll think up some excuse for the high citadel. They can cut my funding if they want to. I won't let them get their hands on you."

"You know," said the Gunner, "it honestly hadn't occurred to me that you would let them."

Helena nodded, feeling obscurely pleased with herself. "Well," she said. "Good."

 

"Do you sleep?" she asked a little later. "I could lie you down at night. If you want."

The Gunner raised one sharp black eyebrow. "You could indeed," she agreed. "But I'd really rather you wouldn't."

"Ah," said Helena, feeling suddenly rather young and foolish. "Sorry."

The Gunner shook her head. "I've slept enough, that's all," she said. "I believe you said they found me in an attic, up in the citadel?"

Helena shrugged helplessly. "That's what the cleric told me," she said. "I think they just forgot about you."

"Believe me," said the Gunner. "It's nice not to be needed."

 

"This is ridiculous," the Gunner said, pushing herself upright against the wall like an unwieldy puppet, strings half cut.

"It really is," Helena agreed. "For fuck's sake, don't fall on any of the jars."

"Yes, that would be a terrible pity, wouldn't it," said the Gunner, trying to take a step forward and failing. She wobbled back against the wall, the spikes of her headpiece swaying dramatically. "Just terrible." She sagged back down, sliding to the floor with a great scraping clang.

"I need to up your dosage," said Helena, frowning and rolling up her sleeve.

"You really don't, Alchemist Second Class," said the Gunner. "I assure you." She looked up at Helena. "I'm afraid in any case, it wouldn't do any good coming from you," she said, rather gently. "How long have you been dosing yourself, Alchemist de Sousa? Second Class?"

Helena cleared her throat. "A live subject was necessary," she said, roughly. "There may be some kinks to iron out -"

"You don't say," said the Gunner wearily. "How long is it since you've eaten? Since you've drunk anything but beer? Since you've drunk beer?"

Helena turned away.

"Really," the Gunner called after her, "in my day we had a reason to volunteer for the transformation! You think a lost sister is anything special?"

But Helena was already out of the door, unmooring her creaky little rowing boat from the jetty.

 

When she came back, the lower city dark and full of long soft noises and the slap of water, the Gunner was sitting in the doorway, waiting for her.

"I apologise," she said, as Helena fastened the rope to the mooring post. "I should never have mentioned your sister."

Helena clambered up onto the jetty. "No," she said shortly. "You shouldn't have." Then she caught her breath. The Gunner had taken off her armour. She was only a woman, now, with grey-streaked hair still damp from washing, in a pair of Helena's old trousers and a shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Black ports and tubing decorated her arms, set in livid scar tissue. Behind her, portions of her armour were scattered across the floor, trailing tubes and wires, a cast-off carapace. The unfortunate spiked headpiece was set up by the door, hat hooked back on top. "It comes off," said Helena. "I mean, of course it does. We should have done it before. I thought -"

"Don't worry," said the Gunner, mouth quirking at her scar. "As a matter of fact, it really isn't meant to. We never expected any of us to last long enough for it to become an issue, to be quite honest." She turned to look at Helena. "Let alone that anyone would replicate the process after the war. Not that we thought, then, that there would be such a thing."

"After the war?"

"After the war."

 

The Gunner's skin, in the last of the sun, was still ashen, too smooth, too still, as if the light hit it wrong. Helena's skin, darker, was only chalky. But, she knew quite well, she had been cold for days.

"How did you know?" she asked, dully.

The Gunner patted the jetty beside her. "I suppose," she said thoughtfully, "I am the only person in this city who would. And as such, I can tell you that you're really very lucky. Quite often, the transformation doesn't take. The subject exposed to elixir and the flesh of Eaters dies entirely, though quite slowly. An unpleasant process."

Helena thought of the experiments that had failed, the flesh in her jars that had never moved again, and shivered.

"Of course," the Gunner said, "You realise that you have not conquered death. We will run down, you know, most likely, in the end. And in the meantime, we need -"

"We need blood," said Helena.

"Or flesh," said the Gunner cheerfully. "But blood will do. Just a little. And you have your supply line set up already, how convenient!"

Helena barked out a laugh, surprising herself, and sat down. "You know," she said, staring out at the canal, "I really want a beer."

"I'd get used to it," said the Gunner. "I'm afraid you've had your lot, Alchemist Second Class de Sousa."

"Helena," said Helena.

The Gunner turned to her, mouth curling up. "I'm afraid I can't introduce myself properly," she said. "In the old days, we gave up our names when we volunteered. I'm plain old Gunner, now."

"Gunner," said Helena. The word shifted in her mouth, gained the shape of a name. "Gunner."

 

"You aren't going to stop, are you," said Gunner. "Your alchemy? Those things in the jars?"

Helena sighed. She had to concentrate to do so, now, she realised. Breathing was no longer truly necessary. "I'll get rid of my specimens," she said slowly. "But I won't stop working. I'm my own specimen, now, after all."

"At least let me tell you," said Gunner, "how that sort of thing tended to play out, back in the war. It took a lot of work to make a soldier like myself, you know."

Helena looked at Gunner's arms, riddled with attachments, with rough black metal. "Does it hurt?" she asked.

Gunner shrugged. "Not any more, to speak of," she said. "But it did, yes. For all of us."

Helena swallowed. "How many of you were there?" she asked.

"Oh," said Gunner, "really quite a few. Hundreds." She laughed a little, creaky and low. "But all we wanted," she said, staring out across the water at the empty square, "was for humans to carry on. Being stupid and strange and reckless, as humans are. And goodness knows," she said, "you are all of those things, Helena."

"I'm not quite human any more, though," said Helena. "I'm like you, more or less. Less, maybe."

"Not less, I'd say."

Helena looked sideways at the Gunner. "You were right, you know," she said. "It wasn't really about my sister. I just didn't want to die, like her."

"Like this city," said Gunner, softly.

"Oh, Gunner," said Helena. "The lower city is dead, but the citadel isn't. Let me take you up there. Or out beyond the walls."

"Beyond the walls?"

"It's where the people went," said Helena. "It's awful. Towns and markets, all over the place. Bustling. We'll put some makeup on you. You can wear my hat. You'll like it."

Gunner looked at her, and raised one dry grey hand to cup her face. "You know, Helena," she said, "I think I will."

And Helena, lifting her own cold hand to cover Gunner's, felt her own mouth tugged up, slowly, into a wide smile.

 

 


End file.
